Black Rochester at Midcentury

This chapter charts the emergence of a sizable Black population in New York city, starting with the Black renaissance that happened in the fields and orchards surrounding the city, an agricultural belt responsible for growing a significant portion of the nation's food supply. It talks about local white agricultural workers that abandoned the fields for better-paying factory jobs in Rochester, Buffalo, and Syracuse, which created a labor shortage in the fields. It also mentions how farmers turned to places like Sanford, Florida, and to the “East Coast Migrant Stream” to employ Black agricultural migrants. The chapter recounts how the agricultural migrants eventually left the stream and opted instead to put down roots in the North, with Rochester becoming a popular destination. It discusses how the new influx of Black migrants created a demographic shift, the likes of which Rochester had never seen before.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter argues that it is not at all coincidental that today Andean women are the emblematic figures in the national imagination, representing both a rich cultural history and the last vestiges of a perceived “backward” and recalcitrant culture. This book offers a close examination of the ambivalent ways in which gender, race, and cultural heritage intertwine to position Andean women as the quintessential subjects of both national pride and everyday scorn and neglect in Peru. Studies from the former hacienda community of Vicos, the highland city of Huaraz, and the migrant stream to Lima, placed in relation to broader regions of Latin America, provide ample ethnographic material to support that argument. The book has engaged in a self-critical process of locating the author’s writings in the historical contexts in which they were written and then reexamining them from the present vantage point of emergent decolonial feminisms. Ultimately, her objective has been to work toward a decolonial feminist anthropology of gender, race, and indigeneity that recognizes culturally diverse lives in all their complexity, as neither saints nor sinners, neither iconic heroes nor pitiable victims. The work should inspire others to undertake their own reflections and contribute to what she hopes will be a growing and vigorous discussion of gender, race, and other axes of power in Latin America and beyond.

The Journey of Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak

This chapter tells the story of peasants from rural Poland who entered a migrant stream around the turn of the twentieth century that carried them, along with tens of millions of others, across a number of clearly marked national borderlines as well as a number of unmarked cultural ones. The peasants were a couple named Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak, and the words spoken by them as well as the events recalled here are based on the hundreds of letters and diaries gathered in the 1910s by two sociologists from the University of Chicago, W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. The chapter first describes the world into which Piotr and Kasia were born, focusing on family, village, and land. It then considers their journey, together with millions of other immigrants, and how they changed both the face of Europe and the face of the United States.

“Go Work Over There and Come Do Something Here”

This chapter discusses a particular group that dominated the migrant stream from Mexico to the United States in 1965. The group contained a large share of men—many of them household heads who were married with children—from rural central-western communities in Mexico. Migrants in the group typically had little education, worked in agriculture in both Mexico and the United States, and took multiple trips of short duration. This group is referred to as circular migrants. Circular migrants declined both in absolute numbers and in relative size over time, accounting for less than 10 percent of new migrants by 2010. Circular migrants declined in numbers as incomes in Mexico rose, real wages in the United States fell, and the budget dedicated to securing the border grew exponentially between 1965 and 2010.

Introduction

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes. This book is about Mexico–U.S. migration flows between 1965 and 2010. It seeks to characterize and explain the diversity in the Mexican migrant stream, which, in this period, changed remarkably not only in its composition and origins in Mexico, but also in its destinations and settlement patterns in the United States. The book has three central theses. First, Mexicans may be on the move to the United States for a variety of reasons. Second, the different reasons underlying migration depend on individual interests, but these interests are shaped by the structural or cultural contexts these individuals inhabit, or seek to inhabit, by migrating. Third, different theories may be more or less relevant to explain migration behavior to the extent that the conditions they deem essential to the process are at work in a given place or period or for a specific group of individuals.